When Olaf Kirche joined the LDP in 1992, he wrote two small chapters on UUCP and smail, which he meant to contribute to the System Administrator's Guide. Development of TCP/IP networking was just beginning, and when those "small chapters" started to grow, he wondered aloud whether it would be nice to have a Networking Guide. "Great!" everyone said. "Go for it!" So he went for it and wrote the first version of the Networking Guide, which was released in September 1993. Olaf continued work on the Networking Guide and eventually produced a much enhanced version of the guide. Vince Skahan contributed the original sendmail mail chapter, which was completely replaced in that edition because of a new interface to the sendmail configuration.

In March of 2000, Terry Dawson updated Olaf's original, adding several new chapters and bringing it into the new millennium.

The version of the guide that you are reading now is a fairly large revision and update prompted by O'Reilly Media and undertaken by Tony Bautts. Tony has been enthusiastic Linux user and information security consultant for longer than he would care to admit. He is coauthor of several other computer security-related books and likes to give talks on the subject as well. Tony is a big proponent of Linux in the commercial environment and routinely attempts to convert people to Gentoo Linux. For this edition he has added a few new chapters describing features of Linux networking that have been developed since the second edition, plus a bunch of changes to bring the rest of the book up to date.